It’s not Facebook. It’s Paper. Is this the next blunder from Facebook?
Facebook Paper is gaining a lot of buzz. It takes nearly 30 months to build the app, which is quite long for Facebook’s standard. When Paper was rolled out, many users were surprised by its design, which is image-heavy. It looks next to nothing like the Facebook app.
While not unexpected, Paper was still uncommon. Facebook has built other standalone apps over ten years, including one app you’ve probably never heard of (like Facebook Pages Manager), and another Facebook hopes you never will (Poke, anyone?).
What about Paper?
Though it seemed like a hit at its launching, Paper has dropped on the App Store charts. Many users are still trying to grasp where Paper fits in with their social media use. By making Paper a standalone app, Facebook is making a big bet that users will find it useful, despite similar competitor apps already available. However, Facebook sees the app differently than most of us do. It’s not supposed to be a newspaper. It’s a printing press.
It’s Not About The News
Paper has been widely labeled as a news reader app by the media, yet that’s not actually how Facebook intended it.
On Paper, users can flip between multiple categories that they choose to follow, like tech or sports or food. One of these sections is the news feed, and users can post to their Facebook profile from within the app.
“It was the publishing aspect that the Paper team intended to build out” says Paper Product Manager Michael Reckhow. “Paper wasn’t just built for consuming. it was built to offer users better tools for sharing and creating their own content.”
The “news reader” functionality is unexpected for the Paper team, but it wasn’t a disappointment. They succeeded in creating something unexpected. On a basic level, publishers really need two things: an audience and tools to create and share their ideas. Facebook has always had the world’s greatest audience, now 1.2 billion and counting. The only one missing is a reliable publishing tool.
Paper users can see more clearly what their published product will look like on the news feed. It’s a more accurate and visual representation of what the user is creating. Unlike the traditional Facebook app, news feed on paper scrolls horizontally, not vertically. This radically different design was one of the main reasons Paper wasn’t simply built into the existing Facebook app. The changes were too drastic for the existing news feed infrastructure. Plus, changing news feed’s design without notice would have probably resulted in a mass panic by users.
Paper will continue to expand its features, and Facebook is already collecting data in order to personalise what the users see. It’s likely Paper will continue to add publishing tools, building an experience that aligns more closely with the way the creators envisioned the app. For online marketers, the strategy isn’t exactly typical for Facebook, but then again, this isn’t Facebook. It’s Paper.